It is notable, because the Fremont Internet company is getting funded by venture folks who have little experience in the area — at least so far. The venture firm is Silicon Valley’s SDL Ventures. The amount was undisclosed.

Brilliant is the latest in a slew of comparative shopping companies. Mature players abound, including Yahoo, Google and Shopping.com. There are also privately held NexTag, Shopzilla, PriceGrabber and Become. (In June, E. W. Scripps announced that it had agreed to buy Shopzilla. Become, of Mountain View, announced a $7.2 million second round in late May.)

Phillip Lan said he wants to get the product shopping right, and only then think about offering research, which Become also does.

SDL Ventures, of Menlo Park, is led by Donald Scifres, formerly the founder and CEO of SDL, the San Jose optical components company that was one of the hottest during the Internet bubble years. Scifres’ partner is Michael Foster, the former chief financial officer at SDL.

Read the story for more. (We apologize to Phillip Lan for misspelling his name on a second reference in the story. Somehow, it slipped through two lines of Merc editing.) Our last report on Brilliant was here.

With the quick progress on the Infinera question earlier, we’ll try our luck again: Any tipster out there know how much Brilliant Shopper raised from SDL?